In another place, another time, I wrote of what it was like for me in high school. I spoke of others that I'd met and known, wondered what it was like for them. Based on my own experience and what they had told me, I assumed that it really hadn't been all that bad for them.

I feel like I should go back and find Max and those other students that I talked about and apologise.

I think that high school for them may have been much worse than I had any knowledge of.

And it makes me feel that I was incredibly lucky, and guilty for having been lucky.

Several links relevant to this essay are in the Tuesday, February 1 Grim Amusements weblog; you should look through those first.

On the Tuesday, February 1 showing of Oprah, they discussed the idea that because of the violence, the cliques and other wasted time aspects of high school, perhaps it should be abolished. Dr. Leon Botstein, President of Bard College and author of Jefferson's Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture, says we should abolish high school after the 10th grade and start a new system that graduates students when they are 16 years old. (How any new system is supposed to be better, I'm not sure.) I guess after that, people interested in further education would go on to a sort of four year junior college system, more like a European system than our current one. People not interested in further education might simply go into the work place. (Expecting a 16-year old to know and do what is ultimately best for them in the long term strikes me as singularly unwise--but then, given that students can drop out at 16, I suppose it's functionally not a lot different from the current system.)

At first, I just thought he was being rather a blowhard, to be honest. Schools, at least in this country, have always had problems with violence and cliques and the other distractions of teenaged life, even at their best. I suspect that they're worse now than they have been--they're larger, they're more heterogenous, so some of that may have been inevitable--but the aspects with which he takes issue have always been there, to some degree.

Then I thought about what I'd said in the above mentioned entry, and I decided to do just a bit of targeted research.

Now I think he was being much too mild.

The problem is that high school is much too late to do anything about the problem.

What I don't understand is when the schools became this intensely unsafe. I mean, they were never the places of sweetness and light that some people would like to think, but surely they can't always have been this bad.

No. I suppose they weren't.

They were probably worse.

I don't wonder that so many gay and lesbian teens kill themselves; if school had been like this for me, I would have, too.

The Safe Schools of Washington report contains descriptions of several incidents that occurred, just in that one state, in just the limited time that they were doing their report and collecting data.

Perhaps you can get through them all; I couldn't.

People will say, "Oh, that's awful, but that's just the occasional isolated incident."

Yes. It is.

146 isolated "events" were reported over a five-year span.

111 of them met the study's qualifications as an "anti-gay incident".

Eight gang rape incidents, including two sixth-grade boys as the victims.

Twenty two physical assaults leading to injury.

Seventeen cases of physical "harrassment or sexual assault, short of rape."

Twelve changed schools to try to escape.

Ten dropped out.

Ten attempted suicide

Two succeeded.

And if you think that it's something that's past, that maybe Washington state has a particular problem with it, or that it's all over now:

• Baltimore Sun, June 8, 1999: "In a prestigious New England prep school long known for its liberal social conscience, a pair of senior boys cornered an underclassman and carved the word "HOMO" on his back, from shoulder to shoulder, using a pen knife. The victim had made the mistake of saying he liked the British rock band Queen, whose lead singer died of AIDS. He waited two days before coming forward to report the assault, which took place in late May. One of the two boys accused in the incident had been accepted to the U.S. Naval Academy, which last week rescinded its offer."
  
• Madison, Wisconsin, October 25, 1999: "An 18-year-old Madison high school student is facing charges after an alleged incident involving a girl wearing a rainbow bracelet. Michael Kingsley told the girl that wearing the bracelet made her a homosexual. When friends of the victim told Kingsley to leave, he became upset and punched one of the girls 10 times in the face and head. Police say Kingsley will not be charged with a hate crime because the victim of the fight was not the person he was allegedly gay bashing." (this is the entire article.)
  
• Reno, Nevada, story filed January 28, 2000, in the Las Vegas Sun: "A former high school student sued Washoe County school officials in federal court Friday, claiming they failed to stop verbal and physical harassment inflicted by classmates because he is gay. [...] At Wooster High, Henkle said he was beaten in a parking lot while two campus police officers looked on. At Washoe High, Davidson said the principal repeatedly told Henkle not to tell people he was gay."
  
• In Boston on January 31 of this year, a student was sexually assaulted by both male and female students from her school on a public train, because they thought she was gay because she held another girl's hand in school; they're all currently out on their own recognaissance. The Boston Herald mentions that the girl attacked is a Native African, whose traditions include holding hands with friends. (By the fact that this is included, one can only assume that they feel that the attack might have been justified if she were, in fact, gay, as opposed to being foreign; the fact that she is foreign is simply not relevant. Whether she is, in fact, gay or not is not relevant, except to her; she was attacked because they thought she was.)
  
• Champaign, Illinois, January 21, 2000: Policies to keep gays safe urged: "The Thursday night meeting at Parkland College started off with a letter from a Champaign County student who said he dropped out of high school after he was taunted, spit on and beaten because he is gay. The student said he was not only harassed by his peers, but he also had heard teachers making jokes about him."
  
• In Bergen, New Jersey, on January 15 an openly gay student was beaten by a classmate. (If that URL expires or doesn't work, try here.)
  
• In the meantime, also in New Jersey, the state legislature may successfully reinstate the Pledge of allegiance!
  

I don't say that people aren't trying to make things better in some places. Boston, as required by Massachusetts law, is, in fact, forming gay-straight alliance clubs. (I will admit that I have my doubts about them, although I can't exactly define why--there's just something about legislating "alliances" that doesn't seem as though it would work well. It also seems as though, should they transgress, students might be forced to join an educational alliance--a sensitivity training seminar, I suppose--to improve their conduct. That would only foster further resentment.)

Madison, Wisconsin, is trying to make their schools safer for gay students and employees alike.

You know what's odd? The thing that would make me a pariah in all the right circles?

I don't even necessarily believe that schools should intervene when people are called names, not all the time. I'm not going to be sophistical and say that "name-calling doesn't hurt"--because, frankly, it hurts like fire, especially when you're young.

But.

Depending on the circumstances and the situation, namecalling is, at least in theory, protected speech. And there is only so far that schools dare go or should go before they turn into thought police. Now, judging those circumstances is, of course, extraordinarily difficult; a blanket ban is much easier to enforce--except that you have to see the actions, and you have to decide the proper thing to do. If teachers witness one student being picked on verbally, of course they should stop it. But the odd word? The casual "fag" thrown down the hall? Even if they do step in at all occasions, that simply drives it underground; it doesn't get rid of it.

And there's not a damned thing they can do about the content of the students' thoughts.

At some level, the responsibility for policing the students' mouths must fall back on the parents.

And eventually, on the students themselves. At some level, at some point, the students must take responsibility for their own action. People throw off their parents' teachings. For that matter, people absorb things their parents never taught. At some time in their youth, what young men and women choose to do comes down to their own personal responsibility. Certainly when it crosses the line into physically attacking another.

That said, I believe that the schools have an absolute duty to protect their students from physical harm, physical harrassment. To be sure, not all of the incidents listed above occurred on school property, or under school authority.

But enough of them did. Enough.

Santa Ana county seems to believe that renaming a support group a "tolerance club" will help, as will forbidding them to discuss sexual topics at all. (And how, one wonders, would they possibly enforce that? To say nothing of the fact that it's flatly illegal and unconstitutional. Even teenagers have some constitutional rights of protected speech.) They are also fighting an overall ban on meeting on public property at all (also unenforceable as long as other clubs want to meet--anyone want to take odds that the school will simply ban all extracurricular nonsports activity, and make life just that much more difficult for those students?)

Maryland tried to promote a harrassment-free policy for their schools, but the policy failed, because parents were upset that their children were required not to harass gays, among the other listed groups; ethnic and religious minorities drew little protest, but including "sexual orientation" caused so much controversy that the policy was scrapped.

Apparently, some parents believe that being verbally abused, beaten and raped is A-OK if you're gay.

By the way, did I mention that seven of the students attacked in the Washington state study identified themselves as heterosexual? Some of their classmates decided that they were gay, or attacked them because they had gay friends, or had spoken in favor of gay rights.

Then again, perhaps it's just as well that these things take place in high schools.

After all, they say schools are supposed to toughen you up, right?

And once you've been through that hell, you'll be a little more prepared for the hell that awaits you in the adult world.

From Gay Chicago Magazine, Newswatch, Tuesday, February 1, 2000:

Medical records reveal gay-bashing injuries
CHICAGO - Cermak Hospital medical records recently received in response to an application by gay-bashing victim Terry Phalen and the Chicago Anti-Bashing Network have confirmed that Terry received "broken bones" while at Cook County Jail.

On Oct. 27, two Cook County sheriff's deputies brutally beat him and shouted anti-gay slurs while a third guard looked on. Shortly after the beating, Phalen was treated at the jail's Cermak Hospital and verbally told by a physician that in addition to the bruises over much of his body, he had hairline fractures of both wrists and two ribs.

CABN is upset that while Cermak released a flood of medical reports dated August 1999 and late November through December 1999, it continues to withhold the most relevant records dated Oct. 27 thru early November. Nonetheless, the County's apparent stonewalling was not 100 percent effective as amongst the reports they did release, they inadvertently included a report dated Nov. 4, 1999, which refers to Phalen's "broken bones."

Recently, Phalen was verbally told by Tom Swaine of the Cook County Inspector General's Office that his charges were sustained by that office and that the two principal officers in the attack were transferred to another area as punishment. Phalen and CABN "find it insulting that management considers this appropriate punishment for a hate crime including assault and battery and is planning to demonstrate at the next Cook County Merit Board meeting to demand that all three officers be fired. The Merit Board, which has a long-standing record of covering up for brutal and corrupt officers, is the branch of County government charged with disciplining Cook County sheriff's deputies."

Granting that the man had been arrested for a crime (auto theft, according to the Tribune).

Granting that he was in jail at the time.

Apparently, it's OK for the police to beat him because he's gay. For their punishment--for abusing their power to such a degree--they get transferred to another district so that they can do it all over again. And there's no reason in the world to believe that their predations were ever confined to people in jails; they're the easiest to find, to be sure, but that badge confers an amazing amount of untouchability. After all, who will the courts believe? Some gay guy who may have a mad-on against the police, or the upstanding police officer who has never had a complaint brought against him? With, most likely, no witnesses?

from the Windy City Times, January 27, 2000: Gay men allege bashing by bouncers:

According to Edwards, just after midnight Jan. 23, the doorstaff at a popular Lincoln Park nightclub insulted his boyfriend, threw his roommate out of the bar headfirst and dragged Edwards 20 feet down the sidewalk by his hair to a doorway where they punched him repeatedly while spewing anti-gay epithets. [...] To compound the nightmare, Edwards and roommate Kurt Schneider ended up spending the night in jail after police arrived and took the side of the doorstaff, in spite of the bouncers' conflicting stories. "The police said, 'If you file a complaint, and they file a complaint, then you go to jail,'" Edwards stated. "Then I said I was just going to call a lawyer. At that point, they said that I was under arrest."

from the BBC via Data Lounge: Report estimates that only 1 in 5 anti-gay crimes reported:

The BBC reports a new survey conducted by the National Advisory Group (NAG) reports fewer than 1 in 5 gay bashing incidents in Britain are ever reported to police. The survey found 56 percent of the 2,600 self-identified gay men and lesbians surveyed throughout Britain reported being the targets of a homophobic incident. [...] Nationwide, only 18 percent of anti-gay attacks are ever taken to the police. More than 70 percent of those surveyed said they were reluctant to report these incidents to police out of fear of suffering further humiliation or harassment from officers.

Consider: in comparatively law-abiding Britain, only one in five incidents is reported. If that's true there, how many go unreported here?

In fact the Anti Gay Violence section of Data Lounge lists at least one story about some sort of violence in every single issue, put out every two weeks, back to 1997.

So I suppose the students might as well be prepared.

When the man had finished speaking, the boy frowned, considering. In the end, he said only, "That was not a very nice story."

His parent agreed. "No. Not nice at all. Why would you tell my child such things?"

The man closed his book. "Not all stories are nice. But sometimes, we need stories that are not nice and are not pretty."

The boy asked, "But will they all live happily ever after?"

The storyteller considered. "For that answer, you should someday ask your parent."